[deck info & ordering] [deck contributor bios] [sources of schematics on cards]
10 of DIAGRAMs, an anthology celebrating ten years of this little kickass magazine, takes the form of a full deck of cards (poker-size). It is playable, an actual deck of cards. It is also readable, a special issue of DIAGRAM. It includes, as you may imagine, a number of new diagrams.
We asked former contributors and other favorite writer-types to pick a card, any card, and to write or draw or whatever a piece for that card. The piece--prose or poem or sometimes both--would have to indicate the suit and rank of the card, so the deck is actually usable for play.
Especially useful for poker, euchre, spades, estimation (screw the dealer), cribbage, and any other card game. This deck is ideal for slipping the Queen of Spades to your friend Nicole when playing hearts (provided you are sure she is not shooting the moon).
Now you know what to buy for your gambling-addicted brother. Or your plethora of relatives in comas. Just think how good they'll feel adorned by a deck of cards and photographed and put on Facebook.
Sample at left/right of card faces, backs, box.
$10 + shipping. Buy with a credit card via paypal here:
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Because the Deck is Small, Our Contributors' Bios are Henceforth Here:
Stephanie Anderson is the author of two chapbooks, In the Particular Particular (New Michigan Press) and The Choral Mimeographs (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in dear camera, H_ngm_n, Handsome, Harp & Altar, Strange Machine, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and co-edits Projective Industries.
*Sarah Blackman is the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She has recent work published or fortcoming in Fairy Tale Review; American Fiction; and Forklift, Ohio. Her chapbook Such a Thing as America is coming out with Burnside Review Press and she thinks diamonds are tacky.
Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that is stalking towards them is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2011. She is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press).
Jason Bredle is the author of two books and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently The Book of Evil, winner of the 2009 Dream Horse Press chapbook contest. He lives in Chicago.
Austin Bunn lives in Grand Rapids and teaches at Grand Valley State University, where people often refer to him as Ander accidentally.
Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2, 2004). She teaches at the University of California, Davis, where many professors are currently working to keep the university from being privatized. You can find her microfictional apocalypses in fine online journals.
John D'Agata is the author of the collections Halls of Fame and About a Mountain and the anthologies The Lost Origins of the Essay and The Next American Essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
Brian Evenson is the author of nine books of fiction, including Altmann's Tongue, The Open Curtain, and, most recently, Fugue State. He directs the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.
*Tom Fleischmann has recent work in Indiana Review, The Pinch, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast, and is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at DIAGRAM.
Albert Goldbarth's books have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award; his latest is To Be Read in 500 Years (Graywolf Press). His fingers have never touched a computer keyboard, though they've been almost everyplace else.
*Heidi Gotz has been the Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM since its inception in 2000. She first worked with Ander Monson years before as co-Editor-in-Chief of Catch, Knox College's student literary magazine. She considers herself fortunate to work with such talented staff members and contributors. The first ten years have been enjoyable and extremely rewarding. She's expects nothing less for the next ten.
Caitlin Horrocks' first short story collection, This Is Not Your City, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2011. Stories from the collection appear in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Melanie Jordan's chapbook, Ghost Season, is now available from Ropewalk Press. Her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Cimarron Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Third Coast, Poetry Southeast, Southern Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She teaches at the University of West Georgia.
Paul La Farge is the author of three books: The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann or the Distinction, and The Facts of Winter. He is currently working on a project about some people in America.
*Dolly Laninga graduated from Grand Valley State University in 2008. She took her BA around the world and back again, and will someday stop dithering.
Sean Lovelace has a flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press titled How Some People Like Their Eggs. He likes to run, far. He blogs [here].
Barbara Maloutas has two books of poetry published, In a Combination of Practice and the whole Marie, Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner in 2008. Her two chapbooks are Practices and Coffee Hazilly Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, FreeVerse, Segue, Tarpaulin Sky, Good Foot, dusie, bird dog, Greatcoat, elimae, The New Review of Literature, OR, Octopus Magazine and Interbirth Books. Selections of her work are anthologized in Intersections: Innovative Poets of Southern California (Green Integer) and Segue's Fifth Anniversary Issue.
Ben Marcus is the author of Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. Stories and essays of his have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there. As Fort Wayne was the site of, at least, nine forts (three each of French, British, and American fortifications, not to mention fortified villages of the Shawnee and Miami tribes), there was fostered in Martone a keen attraction to walls, fences, barriers of all kinds so much so that he was marked (as he matured) with what can only be thought of as a fetish for such structures which now (years later) expresses itself in his vast collection of examples he displays at his West End house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There, the visitor might find field stone walls (dry and mortared, finished and rough), vertical wood-picket fences with various finials and knurls, bamboo stave, horizontal clapboard running fence (reproduced in crosshatching or herring bone patterns), chain-link cyclone mesh, chicken wire, wrought-iron worked, brick, concrete block, red cedar plank snow-fencing, a four yard section of the right field fence bought at auction during the demolition of Yankee Stadium, corrugated galvanized steel, split-rail, adobe, dry-wall, wattle and beam, electrified, and several versions of “invisible” pet fencing. Martone has a real fondness for star fortification (also known as trace italienne) and has in his backyard reconstructed the walled city of Neuhasel in Lower Hungry with its ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes and tenailles and tenaillons and counterguards and crownworks hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps and the long grassed glacis suitable for picnics. He also has the largest collection of barbed wire in west central Alabama, including an example of contemporary razor and concertina wire. Martone has also written the authorized biography of Joseph F. Glidden (of DeKalb, Illinois), widely regarded as the man who perfected Lucien B. Smith's original design of the famous agricultural fencing.
Philip Metres is the author of numerous books, including: To See the Earth (2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), and Instants (2006). He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out the blog.
*Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM as you may already be aware.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of two short-story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue.
Lia Purpura is the author of, most recently, On Looking, (essays, Sarabande Books) a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and King Baby (poems, Alice James Books) winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Recent poems and essays appear in AGNI, FIELD, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other magazines. She is Writer in Residence at Loyola University, in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency Program, in Tacoma, WA.
*Emma Ramey says "Roll Tide!"
Aurelie Sheehan is the author of two novels, History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, as well as a short story collection, Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant. She teaches fiction and directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Michael Sheehan is an Assistant Fiction Editor at DIAGRAM and currently the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI where he lives, writes and plays fetch with his dog, Miles. Miles does the fetching.
*Katie Jean Shinkle is an Assistant Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM, as well as Managing Editor for Del Sol Press.
*Lauren Goodwin Slaughter's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden's Ferry, Fugue, 42opus, Cimarron Review, Blue Mesa Review, Salt Hill and elsewhere. She has recently been awarded scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Bruce Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of five books of poems, The Common Wages, Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth), Mercy Seat, The Other Lover (University of Chicago), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and, most recently, Songs for Two Voices (Chicago, 2005).
*Nicole Walker is the author of This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street Press, 2010). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Crazyhorse, among other places. She has been granted an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Kellie Wells has published two books, one called Compression Scars, the other called Skin. (Neither has anything to do with the porn star who shares her name).
Derek White is the author of Marsupial. He is the founding editor of Calamari Press & Sleepingfish. [blog]
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth. Two new books are due out next year: Selenography, a collaboration with the Polaroids of Tim Rutili, and Poets on Teaching, an anthology of 99 essays. He lives in Chicago and Athens, Georgia. The title of this piece is from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.
Mark Yakich's most recent poetry collection is The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin Poets, 2008). [website]
Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), and Persons Unknown (2010), each of which contributes to a Civil Rights memorial in progress. Originally from Alabama, he lives now in Denver, where he edits Copper Nickel.
Charles Yu's story collection, Third Class Superhero, was published by Harcourt in 2006. In 2007, he was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35". His first novel, How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, will be published by Pantheon in 2010.
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*As you can see, we asked some of our long-term editors to write pieces for the issue. Nepotism, whatever. It's ten freaking years, y'all! It's a celebration! Eat it, haters.
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Schematic Sources, sorted by card suit and rank:
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Box front: J. R. Swisher et al, "Double-Faced Scare Bird Owl," US Patent No. 2,582,514, Jan. 15, 1952
Card back: Author and illustrator unknown, The Philosophical Magazine II.1., c. 1890
8 of clubs: U. S. Department of Transportation, Flight Training Handbook, Revised 1980, Design Advertising Inc., 1982
9 of clubs: J. S. Beritoff, Neural Mechanisms of Higher Vertebrate Behavior (trans., ed., W. T. Liberson), Little Brown, 1965
king of clubs: Richard R. Starrett, The PR-24 Police Baton: a Training Manual for Law Enforcement Officers, Monadnock Lifetime Products, 1976
ace of clubs: Joseph J. De Filipo, "Gold Club Holder Attachment for Prosthesis," US Patent No. 3,747,128, July 24, 1973
3 of spades: C. W. Whitney, "The current Encyclopedia: Acetylene," The World To-Day 11.3, 1902
4 of spades: Anthony B. Gerard and Jean M. Mandler, "Ontological Knowledge and Sentence Anomaly," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22.1, 1983: 105-20
5 of spades: Munro S. Edmonson, Lore: an Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971
7 of hearts: P. T. Saunders, An Introduction to Catastrophe Theory, Cambridge UP, 1980
8 of hearts: U. S. Department of Transportation, Flight Training Handbook, Revised 1980, Design Advertising Inc., 1982
10 of hearts: Stephan Konz, Work Design, Grid Publishing, 1979
ace of hearts: David Halliday and Robert Resnick, Physics Parts I and II, John Wiley & Sons, 1960
2 of diamonds: Glenford J. Myers, The Art of Software Testing, John Wiley & Sons, 1979
4 of diamonds: Rex Miller and Ellsworth M. Russel, Machinists Library: Toolmakers Handy Book, Theodore Audel & Co., 1978
5 of diamonds: Rudolf F. Graf, Ed., Radio Shack New 1974-1975 Dictionary of Electronics, Radio Shack/Tandy, 1974
7 of diamonds: Aaron H. Shovers, "Personality Analyzer," US Patent No. 5,696,981, Dec. 9, 1997
jack of diamonds: Rudolf F. Graf, Ed., Radio Shack New 1974-1975 Dictionary of Electronics, Radio Shack/Tandy, 1974
king of diamonds: Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, HarperSanFrancisco, 1990
ace of diamonds: J. Jacobson, "Spectrum Colored Stone or Body," US Patent No. 484,934, Oct. 2, 1892
jokers: Martin M. Baker, "Design for an Electric Lamp," US Patent No. 153,056, Mar. 15, 1949
